News
STILL ENDANGERED
Since 1988 the National Trust for Historic Preservation has selected eleven historic sites it considers the most endangered in the country. To qualify for this list a site must be threatened by neglect and deterioration and suffer from a lack of maintenance and funding. In 1998 the list included as a group 103 historically black colleges and universities.
The oldest extant black college is Lincoln University, founded as Ashmun Institute in 1854. Cheney State University, sometimes considered the first, was established in 1837 as a high school called the Institute for Colored Youth. For over 175 years these institutions and others like them have been the training round for black professionals, including doctors, lawyers, educators, bankers, entrepreneurs, and civil rights leaders. Lately many of these landmarks have suffered acutely because of inadequate funding.
Trying to restore and preserve them is an uphill fight. But it is a battle that can be won. If you attended a historically black college or university, do whatever you can to make sure your alma mater will survive to educate the next generation. Even if you’re not an alumnus or alumna, I urge you to adopt a college in your area and make a donation toward the future. The National Trust’s warning underlines the importance of these institutions. And, even though HBCU’s have not appeared as a group on the list since 1998, the problem and need for your support remains. It’s up to us to see that they last.
Kentucky Hamlets
Photographer Sarah Hoskins’ mission is not so much to preserve history, as to keep people and places from passing into history, without acknowledgement or notice, understanding or regard. This has been her passion since she began 13 years ago to create a visual record of hamlets near Lexington, Kentucky, small villages founded by ex-slaves and populated by their fifth- and sixth-generation descendants. Because these hamlets are largely missing from academic literature, Sarah’s effort is the first real survey of an important part of black history.
Unlike many of the towns and historic sites American Legacy has covered in the past, the more than 30 hamlets Hoskins has captured in her thousands of photographs do not always appear to have obvious importance—although early structures do exist—in dwindling numbers as they are torn down, collapse, or in the case of a 75-year old tobacco barn there, burn down. The history is in the people who have preserved the customs of their ancestors. Hamlet natives who’ve moved to the big city, Lexington, often still come home for Sunday services and dinner. The hamlets are important, most of all, because they still exist.
There were dozens of hamlets in Kentucky after the Civil War; many were wiped out or disappeared before Hoskins began her project. This is an old story, especially true of African-American communities and towns founded after Emancipation. If they didn’t fail outright, or they actually thrived, they might be destroyed for merely being black and successful—only witness the events at Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1898, where the majority population of African Americans were run out of town by white supremacists; or the destruction of the middle-class black neighborhood of Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921. Some traditionally black lands, once considered undesirable, are now coveted and snatched up by realtors—the barrier islands of Georgia and South Carolina, populated by the Gullah/Geechee nation, descendants of West Africans brought to the area to work on the rice plantations, are such a place.
Hoskins’ ongoing project is a visual record and foil against suburban and urban renewal and sprawl that bedevil the black hamlets of Kentucky. When she found a new community called Sugar Hill, she was able to visit with an 84-year-old hamlet resident, one whom she had been told by others would shoot at her if she came on her property. The elder instead welcomed her into her home, and in the course of Sarah’s visit pointedher to yet another undocumented community. What is most striking about Hoskins is that she does what she does as much for the residents of these villages, as for historical posterity. Many hamlet residents did not really believe their hometowns were important until they saw Hoskins traveling several hours back and forth between her home in Illinois and Kentucky, sometimes month after month, year after year. Now they play their own part in preserving their towns. She has inspired them, which makes her project not only crucial in terms of its historical value, but important on the most important level, at least for us, the human one. “Her presence in our communities over the past four years has renewed a pride in the old hamlets,” wrote one resident in a 2004 letter to the Guggenheim Foundation (Hoskins worthy work did not garner a fellowship). “She is well-known and received by the older members of the communities who are often very skeptical when visitors ‘show up’ but yet have been revitalized because someone is taking the time to show sincere interest and concern for them.
“I only wish I could fully express the importance of her work and what it means to all of us. From Maddoxtown to Jimtown, from New Zion to New Vine, from Utteringtown to Peytontown, from Bracktown to Cadentown (to name a few) she has made good friends who eagerly anticipate her arrival each time she ventures from Chicago, Illinois. As a result she has compiled a list of names—friends given her by local residents that is quite extensive and she manages to keep in contact with many of us by phone. She is so highly favored because she did not come to take away from us like so many do, but unknowingly she has restored a sense of pride once again in our African-American heritage.”
Hoskins continues her mission of restoration. Her latest project is to capture the remaining Rosenwald Schools—erected in the early twentieth century by black communities in the South and Midwest to raise the quality of education for African Americans. Members of the communities raised money, and their funds were matched, beginning in 1917, by Sears and Roebuck founder and philanthropist Julius Rosenwald through a program he developed with Booker T. Washington at Tuskegee Institute. By the end of the program in 1933 nearly 5,000 schools had been erected in 15 states. Over the decades, some of the buildings were used for other purposes; many fell into ruin, or were simply torn down. Some have been restored and repurposed with help from the National Trust for Historic Preservation. In 2010 The Alice Rosenwald Flexible Fund for Rosenwald Schools gave Hoskins funds to print her photos of those schools that are still in danger of being lost, and in need of rehabilitation. Ultimately the prints were used for the Robert C May exhibition/lecture series at The University of Kentucky.
A man named Ernest Talbert, whom Hoskins photographed killing hogs, told her when she attended her first Talbert family reunion, “you are one of us now.” Later he would tell her, “We should have been taking photos all along.”
To see more of Sarah Hoskins’ Kentucky hamlets and her Rosenwald project visit www.sarahhoskins.com
Thomas Day, Master Craftsman
A wealthy free black man in the antebellum South? A rare thing indeed. But master craftsman and cabinetmaker Thomas Day was such a man, sought after by the richest tobacco farmers for his hand built classically inspired furniture. He would count two governors and the University of North Carolina among his clients.
Originally from Dinwiddie County, Virginia, Day had the great luck to be born, in 1801, into a family that had been free for generations. When laws became more restrictive for free blacks in Virginia, as they had been increasingly in the South, the Day family moved to Caswell County, North Carolina. Day apprenticed to his father, then struck out on his own, advertising in local papers in 1827: “Thomas Day, Cabinet Maker returns his thanks for the patronage he has received and wishes to inform his friends and the public that he has on hand, and intends keeping, a handsome supply of mahogany, walnut, and stained furniture, the most fashionable and common bedsteads.”
Thomas Day: Master Craftsman and Free Man of Color, which opened in the Renwick Gallery at the Smithsonian American Art Museum on April 12, takes a close look at the career of Thomas Day and his surviving furniture and architectural woodwork, some of the best craftsmanship of any artisan of the nineteenth century.
Today called one of the fathers of the North Carolina furniture industry, Day’s success among the landed gentry and prominent whites helped him maintain a thriving business and protected him from some of the more draconian laws designed to hobble African Americans. At one time he asked for and received help from North Carolina’s attorney general and many other white citizens when laws forbidding free blacks to enter North Carolina stopped his bride Aquilla Wilson from traveling from Virginia to join him. Day’s popularity was fed by the fashion of the time among the gentry of building their homes in neoclassical style—Greek Revival being particularly popular. Day combined his own motifs, with fluid lines and spiraling forms that immediately identified his furniture and architectural elements from that of others. Woodwork in about 80 homes in rural North Carolina and Virginia today has been attributed to Day.
His story might have ended here, the tale of an African-American who beat the odds, if there wasn’t an aspect of Day’s life that is at once troubling and complicated: The master cabinetmaker owned slaves, at one time 14 of them according to an 1850 census. He also employed indentured servants
Scholars debate why he did what he did. Some say that, as was the case with other black slaveholders, he may have purchased other African-Americans to free them. “I think there’s a great misunderstanding about what it means for people to own slaves,” said Peter Wood, a history professor at Duke University in a 2010 interview for National Public Radio. “If you are an African-American opposed to slavery but engaged in business with wealthy white planters in North Carolina, the best ‘cover,’ if you will, for the workers that you have with you is to call them slaves.”
Others speculate that Day was just another Southern businessman, and slave labor is what helped keep businesses running in the South. While recognizing that it’s difficult to know what Day’s motives were because there is no written record, Carolyn Boone, Day’s great- great- great-granddaughter, strongly objects to the notion that he was a slaveholder like his rich white clients and insists that oral family history, and the fact that, if he chose to, he could have had hundreds of slaves, yet he only had a few, may points to a deeper purpose.
Thomas Day, Lounge, 1858, walnut with yellow pine
(upholstery not original), Collection of the North Carolina
Museum of History Purchase, state funds.
Thomas Day: Master Craftsman and Free Man of Color includes a wide range of items produced in Day’s shop from 1830 to 1860. The exhibition showcases 39 pieces of furniture crafted by Day, or attributed to his workshop, as well as a Bible owned by Day, three period quilts from the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, historic photographs and contemporary photographs of architectural interiors designed by Day. A majority of the loans are from the North Carolina Museum of History, which has the largest collection of furniture made by Thomas Day.
For more information, please visit the exhibit website at the Smithsonian American Art Museum
A Troublesome Thing
While the idea of black slave owners is nothing new to most people these days, it is nonetheless disturbing for a few reasons. It brings an ache to the gut, or heart. A sadness. A feeling of betrayal. It is that sinking feeling you get when you reach that point in a historical figure’s shining biography that isn’t so shiny. There is that way that folks who like to “excuse” slavery, level the black slaveholder at us as some sort of equalizer.
“Blacks did it, so they were just as bad as whites” is the mantra. Those same folks refuse to put the black slaveholder into a context of any kind. Those of us who do put it into context, sometimes become defensive and refuse to own it. We hide the black slave owner in the back bedroom or attic of our history, like a family member we are ashamed of.
Sides are taken. Lines are drawn. The gap widens. The controversy and paradox of a black slaveholder is troublesome, so much so, that we almost didn’t include Thomas Day and the Smithsonian exhibition devoted to him because of his own history as a slave owner. But there has got to be a point when we examine and own those parts of our history, American history, that are also controversial and troublesome, and try to ferret out not the what, but the why. When we do that, we understand, and can take rightful ownership.
We hope that if you are in the Washington D.C. area you will visit Thomas Day: Master Craftsman and Free Man of Color; we also hope you enjoy learning about the historic Kentucky hamlets, decades-old communities that hold our history in its people. Photographer Sarah Hoskins has been capturing the spirit of these hamlets in an ongoing project.
Introducing Our Two-Sides Newsletter
The black experience (as well as that of other races, ethnicities, and cultures) has been an essential part of the complex, centuries-old, many-layered thing called American history. We know this to be true, but we can’t always put our finger on the facts because they haven’t always been in our history books. The writer Ralph Ellison wrote in an essay in his 1986 book Going to the Territory that “it is well that we keep in mind the fact that not all American history is recorded” and that “we possess two basic versions of American history: one which is written and as neatly stylized as ancient myth, and the other unwritten and as chaotic and full of contradictions, changes of pace and surprises as life itself.”
“In spite of what is left out of our recorded history,” Ellison continues, “our unwritten history looms as its obscure alter ego . . . always active in the shaping of events.”
Gen. George Washington commanding the Continental army is one story; the African-Americans who fought for him in the Revolutionary War are another. And the top chef Hercules, who ran President Washington’s Philadelphia kitchen and household, then walked off to freedom, is yet another story still. Hercules was not the only top black chef in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: Philadelphia had a tradition of black caterers then, and he was one among many. And we can’t forget that while yellow fever raged in the city of brotherly love in 1793, and President Washington and his family decamped to the Pennsylvania countryside, two prominent black ministers—Richard Allen and Absalom Jones—remained in town to care for the sick and dying, oversee the burial of the dead, and help keep the peace.
Not a cherry tree in sight here anywhere.
Ralph Ellison believed there are two sides to history, the written and unwritten, and so do we, hence the name of this newsletter. Each week we’ll attempt to render the second side, the “obscure” history, unwritten no longer.
In our inaugural issue we bring you the story of David Ruggles, an abolitionist who fomented a rebellion on a side street in lower Manhattan. His fight to free blacks from slavery in the early nineteenth century was unwavering, but has largely been lost to time. And because we believe that history does not need to be dry and dusty, but is a living thing, shaping events, as Ellison says, and influencing actions and decisions, we will pair a story from the past, with a current history-related activity, some of them local to a specific region, town, or city, others occurring nationwide. This week Two Sides presents an opportunity for you to contribute to the preservation of our history through a project by Fordham University that documents the lost and abandoned burial sites of enslaved African Americans.
We hope you find something new, interesting, useful, and informative in Two Sides,
and we look forward to hearing what you think.—Audrey Peterson
David Ruggles’ Revolution
Walking on Lispenard Street in downtown New York City, I was enjoying a perfect blue-sky, just crisp September Sunday when I caught the portrait of the late Gil Scott-Heron you see here. I wondered why the unknown person who created the poster chose that spot to showcase the man who told us the revolution will not be televised .
The fact that the Arab Spring uprisings of the past couple of years were not only televised, but thrown worldwide on the Internet notwithstanding (and to be fair, Scott-Heron was making a different point, and a fresh one in 1970 on his live debut album Small Talk at 125th and Lenox), there was no revolution, no uprising going on that street that day. Just a steady stream of tourists buying knock-off designer purses and other goods and trinkets on Canal Street, residential buildings, the denizens of Chinatown, and African street vendors on Broadway and Lispenard Streets.
I snapped the shot and was going to leave the story at that, but then my curiosity got the better of me—but it wasn’t about Gil Scott Heron. I wanted to know why the African vendors, whose goods were packed into rolling suitcases, were all concentrated in that small area. It seemed odd.
I typed in “Africans” along with the street name in the search engine and got no answer, but I did uncover something interesting: There had been a revolution on Lispenard Street.
The only known image of David Ruggles (center) is this contemporary political cartoon, date unknown.
In 1835 a young black activist named David Ruggles founded, along with other African Americans, the New York Committee of Vigilance. The sole purpose of the society was to protect fugitives and confront slave catchers. Slavery had been completely abolished in New York by 1827, but the Fugitive Slave Law of 1793, signed by the first U.S. president, George Washington, himself a slaveholder, stated that a “master” could enter any free state or territory and snatch back his “property.” The official title was “An Act respecting fugitives from justice, and persons escaping from the service of their masters” Nowhere in the actual law does anyone admit to enslaving anyone. Our founding fathers wrote the law as if they had a natural right to enslave other human beings for life based on their African blood.
David Ruggles and his committee had the kind of courage of which many of us can only dream. New York might have emancipated its black people, but there was no love for African-Americans. Many whites wanted to send them back to Africa, and the state constitution, adopted in 1821, disenfranchised most blacks from voting and participating in government. White laborers, encouraged by anti-abolitionist propaganda, rioted to keep blacks from taking all but the most low paying jobs. Any black person doing okay for him- or herself was deeply resented by poor whites.
Ruggles obtained lawyers for people who were “recaptured”—runaways fleeing slavery—and got the city
Broadway and Canal, looking north c. 1835 by John Hill. Lispenard Street is one block southwest, out of the picture.
to grant them trials. He helped some 600 fugitives, including a young Frederick Douglass, who later went on to be a powerful abolitionist. Ruggles had a home and a bookstore at 36 and 67 Lispenard Street, respectively, the former being a refuge for runaways (there is a commemorative plaque there), the latter being set ablaze by arson in 1835. He was so feared and hated by southern slaveholders, his reputation having spread far and wide, that when a wealthy white northerner was in Savannah on business, and was mistakenly identified (by a drunk New York City marshal!) as an abolitionist who consorted with “David Ruggles, a damned nigger” (to quote the same New York marshal) he was nearly beaten by a mob. Lispenard Street is one block southwest and out of the picture.
The undaunted abolitionist did not let any of this stop him—he moved his headquarters to Chapel Street, bought a printing press and distributed his paper The Mirror of Liberty calling out slave catchers for the crime of kidnapping and demanding court dates and legal representation for fugitives. I think about my apartment building in my neighborhood, living there, not knowing whether someone is going to try to burn it down or kill me in the street for my beliefs, and I can hardly imagine it.
When I stand on the corner of Lispenard and Broadway and think of people rioting in lower Manhattan, destroying black homes and businesses, and harassing, beating, and driving black people and their supporters out of the city, it’s nearly impossible to visualize. But it makes sense to me now, the image of Gil Scott-Heron on the wall of the street where another revolutionary lived so long ago. Ruggles used his paper to fight slavery, Scott-Heron used another form of communication—spoken word—to fight racism and discrimination. For me Scott-Heron haunts Lispenard Street as a reminder of what used to be, what still is, and the work that must be done.—Audrey Peterson
Remembering Our Burial Sites
An all-too common occurrence is the loss of early black burial sites. Sometimes they are actively plowed under, built over. The memory of them dwindles, and once sacred ground becomes like one burial ground in Eufaula, Alabama. There are no headstones commemorating the once enslaved in the town graveyard there, just a plaque proclaiming a plain slope of grass the Negro Cemetery, a final resting place for ex-slaves. Anyone or no one could be buried under that grassy slope. Only trust and faith make it so.
But a group of professors and scholars at New York’s Fordham University does not want folks to be forced to go merely on trust and faith. Working with the belief that all burial sites are sacred, the Department of African and African American Studies is attempting to document the existence and location of as many African-American cemetaries, graveyards, and resting places as possible, before they are gone and forgotten.
The Burial Database Project of Enslaved African Americans was established by director Sandra Arnold after she became interested in preserving American slave burial grounds when she found the graves of her ancestors in a plantation cemetery. A similar site called Find-A-Grave, begun in 1995, claims millions of documented gravesites—but unlike Find-a-Grave, which encompasses sites of all types, the Fordham University project is dedicated to only those sites of people who were once slaves.
The database is accepting online submissions on burial sites in any condition—from well-tended to neglected and abandoned—and from varied sources, including communities, churches, private property owners, descendants, and any person dedicated to preservation. Even an individual reporting one grave can become an important contributor.
This means you, Legacy readers. You can be a history keeper. If you know of a cemetery or plot of land that holds the graves of the enslaved or formerly enslaved, visit the burial database project’s submission page. The site asks for family names associated with the burial ground; evidence that makes you suspect it is a slave cemetery; photos, if you can provide them, and other supporting materials.
A woman pays respect to the remains of long-dead Africans—many from Ghana, Nigeria, the Congo, and Madagascar. Forgotten for centuries their graves were rediscovered in 1991 and reinterred in a ceremony in October 2003. ©2013 John T. Stuart
The information you might have can never be too small for a project like this. You can make a difference. When construction began for a government building in 1991, and more than 400 skeletons of seventeenth and eighteenth century Africans were found, it took the dedication of everyone from government workers and scholars to every day citizens to stop the construction, study, and catalog the bones and artifacts, and lay them to rest again. Those long-dead Africans—it is estimated that some 15,000 were buried in an area that covered 6.6 acres—had been forgotten for centuries. Now the African Burial Ground is part of the National Park Service .
For more information about the Burial Database Project visit www.vanishinghistory.org
Opening image: Members of an African-American masons group carry caskets hand carved in Africa. ©2013 John T. Stuart
In Case You Missed It . . .
Last month, a moment that was important to American history got lost in the swirl of the usual economic doom saying, political punditry, celebrity worship: On November 1, President Obama signed a proclamation designating Fort Monroe in Hampton, Virginia, a national monument. It is not glamorous or sexy or controversial, but it is significant. Using his authority under the Antiquities Act, (Theodore Roosevelt used it in 1906 to establish America’s first national monument, Devil’s Tower in Wyoming) President Obama’s stroke of a pen not only protected the recently decommissioned fort and the land it sits on, but in the process of preserving the fort will bring the possibility of up to 3,000 jobs to the area and pouring millions of dollars into the local economy.
“. . . One of the great pleasures of this job, but also one of my responsibilities, is making sure that we are preserving our nation’s treasures so that they can be enjoyed by our children, our grandchildren, our great-grandchildren,” said the President before he signed the order. “ And over the years, over 100 sites have been set aside as national monuments — everything from the Statue of Liberty to the Grand Canyon….
“This is going to give an opportunity for people from all across the country to travel to Fort Monroe and trace the history that has been so important to making America what it is.”
Fort Monroe has the historic, if awful distinction, of “hosting” the first group of Africans in North America (individual Africans had come with the Spanish conquistadors as early as the fifteenth century). A Dutch ship’s captain dropped anchor in the harbor there in 1619 with several indentured African servants (the President said slaves; I am not going to quibble, indentured servants were often treated like slaves, the distinction being that years of indenture were finite). But the captain got picky, decided the site wasn’t adequate, collected some provisions and moved on to Jamestown. The Africans never got off the boat as far as can be ascertained.
In our Summer 2004 issue we took readers to Hampton to uncover its black history. One of the stops on our quest to reveal some surprising things about the port city, including the story about the Africans, was to our now newest national monument. Below is an excerpt from the article Surprising Hampton:
“We jump into a van for the short drive to Fort Monroe. Out the window to my left I see long stretches of green lawns, punctuated with piers reaching out to the bay and graceful white gazebos. This is the Buckroe Beach area. In 1897 a local entrepreneur opened a hotel, dancing pavilion, and amusement park here, all of which were off-limits to black people. So a local businessman named F. D. Banks, along with a few partners, promptly formed the Bay Shore Hotel Corporation. They raised $15,000 to buy property along the bay adjoining Buckroe Beach and built a top-notch resort for African-Americans. The hotel opened for business in 1898; by 1930 the Bay Shore Hotel, which began life as a four-room cottage, had grown to a three-story beach-front establishment with 70 rooms and long porches facing the water. The resort’s popularity waned some after a hurricane severely damaged the buildings in 1933, but big-name African-American entertainers, including Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, and Louis Armstrong, still performed there. The Bay Shore property was sold in 1977 to developers who tore down the original structures.
We cross the Mercury Boulevard bridge over the calm blue-brown waters of Mill Creek (which is really an inlet) to Fort Monroe. Well before the Civil War, 8 percent of Hampton’s sizable black population was free. Whites in Hampton believed in slavery but did not, as a rule, tolerate cruelty. In one instance, a slave ran away from a harsh master and stayed right in town, without ever being caught and returned. However well treated, though, slaves were still slaves, and as we found out at the fort, there would come a time when Hampton’s slaves would run away in droves.
Fort Monroe is the oldest fort in the United States to still be operated by the military. The cornerstone was laid in 1819, and it was garrisoned in 1823 though not completed until 1834. It is the largest stone fort in the country, and the only active one with a moat (three to four feet deep, eight feet deep at high tide). Crabs, jellyfish, and other critters live in its waters.
Across the moat, through the postern (back) gate into the fort, we enter the first of a series of low, arched stone-and-brick rooms. These form the Casemate Museum (a casemate is a chamber in the wall of a fort used for storage, living quarters, or positioning cannon). At Fort Monroe 32-pounder guns hind the fort’s other name, Freedom Fort.
It seems it all started in 1861, when three slaves sought haven here by swimming across the harbor from Sewell’s Point in Norfolk. They belonged to a Colonel Mallory, who demanded them back. But Maj. Gen. Benjamin Butler, who was in command, told Mallory that since Virginia was no longer a part of the Union (it along with 10 other states had seceded from the Union in 1860 and 1861 to form the Confederacy), it could no longer benefit from U.S. laws, which included the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law. Therefore, Major General Butler concluded, the slaves were “contraband” and did not have to be returned.
After Butler’s declaration, nearly 900 refugee slaves ran for the fort. When the Confederate military heard a rumor that the Union Army was going to quarter refugees along with soldiers in Hampton, it burned the town to the ground. One of the only buildings to survive was St. John’s, the church downtown with the lyrical bell. I recall it, and the words of the Confederate private that I read in the rotunda of the museum the day before: “As the smoke ascended to the heavens . . . I thought of how my little hometown was being made a sacrifice to the god of war.”
The ex-slaves did not just run to Fort Monroe and hide; many joined the Union Army. Three units of U.S. Colored Troops (the First and Second U.S. Cavalries and the Battery B Second U.S. Light Artillery) were formed at Fort Monroe; all three saw action in and around Hampton. And for a short time toward the end of the war, Harriet Tubman worked at the fort, as a nurse at the contraband hospital.
The drawing depicts the southern slaves fleeing to the sally port to enter into Fort Monroe to reach the freedom of the Union Army which occupied Fort Monroe during the Civil War.
Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth (1922-2011)
American Legacy mourns the loss of Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, a leader of the civil rights movement who was at the forefront of the battle against segregation in Birmingham, Alabama. Calmly, doggedly, and at great risk to his life, he chipped away at the implacable system that was Jim Crow until it was dismantled. Below is a Fall 2006 article on his struggle, and eventual victory.
ON ONE SIDE WAS THE SQUAT, PUGNACIOUS EUGENE “BULL” CONNOR, a white former radio baseball announcer who made segregation his issue in Birmingham, Alabama. On the other was Fred Shuttlesworth, a wiry, combative black preacher who could fire up an audience like few others, the man who “warmed up the crowd before they brought [Martin Luther] King on to speak,” one veteran Birmingham detective remembered.
Their battleground was the Birmingham of the 1950s and 1960s, described by King in his 1963 book Why We Can’t Wait as “the most segregated city in America.” Connor, who found a place on the Birmingham City Commission in the 1930s, fought to keep his town segregated long after other Southern cities had left Jim Crow behind. Shuttlesworth—who survived Ku Klux Klan bombing attempts, beatings, and harassment by white officials—waged a decade-long battle to knock down the barriers that Connor had sworn to protect.
*Please note: The image on the opening page is not Fred Shuttlesworth. A mistake was made in production and the actual image was switched.
All Gone Home
Back in December 2008, prompted by the death of the folk music queen Odetta, I began to prepare an entry about all of the musical lights the world has lost since our 2008 Music issue. The plan was to post it here during Black Music month. But it seemed that every time I started to work on it, another name had to be added. Already on my list was Bo Diddley, who brought American music his timeless rhythm, and Isaac Hayes, funk king extraordinaire, both of whom died in the summer of 2008. In the fall we lost Levi Stubbs, lead singer of The Four Tops, Dee Dee Warwick, and Miriam Makeba, the South African singer and civil rights activist who broke down barriers around the world with her music and message (Remember “Pata Pata”?) Then came Odetta, followed by the unmatchable Eartha Kitt on Christmas. At the beginning of this month, just three days in, my mom called me to tell me that the blues queen Koko Taylor had passed.
Yesterday, I got on the train to go home and a man who sat behind me said to anyone in the car within earshot “Michael Jackson is dead”. One woman said, “you must have gotten that confused with someone else.” Most people simply did not believe him at first—I think we’ve all been misled by the media rumor mills at least once. But it was more than that. He was only 50 years old. And this man had been a part of American culture for more than four decades, nearly all my life (and I’m 46). When I got off the train and pulled out my phone, I saw that I had several missed calls and messages, one from a person I know had to hunt for my number. The knowledge of his death spread swiftly through all quarters, to all corners.
When I was 7 years old, I decided I was going to marry my first crush. Michael Jackson’s poster went up on my closet door where I could see him before I went to sleep at night. It was 1969 and the Jackson 5 had come out with their first hit “I Want You Back”. Michael would have been around 11. For a lot of us little black girls, he was our prince charming, handsome and talented, and so much cooler than, say, Donny Osmond (sorry!).
Yes, his personal life was murky and sometimes disturbing, and there were deep and troubling questions left unanswered. They may yet be answered, and we may be shocked; I hope not. Still I think back to those more innocent times and the fact that Michael Jackson enriched and transformed the American musical songbook forever. That cannot be denied.
—Audrey Peterson
Order The Interactive Game
